All of the drummers that Barbara Borden saw as a child were men—except for one little boy, a Mouseketeer named Cubby. Even so, at age 5 while shopping one day with her mother at Sears Roebuck, Borden spied a drum and insisted on having it.
At age 70, Borden—drummer, drum teacher and performing artist—knows for certain that “drumming is my path.” The large drum set that occupies a prominent place in the living room of the woodsy Mill Valley home that she shares with her life partner, Naomi Newman, is a monument to her life’s work.
Borden, who grew up in Los Angeles, started on her path when she played the drum kit in her elementary school orchestra. After majoring in percussion at San Francisco College (now University), she studied classical percussion with Roland Kohloff, and years later, she would study with renowned Marin County teacher Chuck Brown. After moving to San Francisco at age 19, Borden was drawn to the city’s many jazz clubs and its beatnik culture, and later became a part of the burgeoning women’s movement. Eventually hooking up with Alive!, a sizzling women’s jazz group that became her musical family, she played everywhere, including at the Keystone Korner in San Francisco and at many other clubs and festivals.
“I thought that band would go on forever,” Borden says of the eight “passionate” years that they played together. “It took me 15 years to get over that ending.” Her father had walked out on the family when she was 8; she hadn’t ever expected to revisit the same kind of sorrow.
Borden’s story is now beautifully and energetically captured in Keeper of the Beat: A Woman’s Journey into the Heart of Drumming. Written and directed by three-time Emmy Award-winning filmmaker David L. Brown, the film was born after a seven-year collaboration. Borden is grateful for Brown’s artistry, as well as his tenacity. “David always goes for the heart in his films and never gives up,” she says.
Keeper of the Beat weaves together original, as well as vintage, footage and stills, and portrays the life of a gifted woman—a pioneer in her field. It has been acclaimed at film festivals, including the Mill Valley Film Festival, and in other venues including PBS television.
Reluctant at first to be the focus of a film, Borden began to think of it as a legacy to inspire people, especially women, to follow their intuition. Newman, writer, director, performer and co-founder of A Traveling Jewish Theatre, convinced Borden that when something is deeply personal it becomes universal. Still, seeing the completed film for the first time in the company of other people made Borden feel “vulnerable.” Now when she sees it she finds it “fulfilling because I can see and appreciate in one hour the arc of my entire life.”
Seeing her perform in the film Keeper of the Beat, one encounters a gracious, intelligent woman with a very large personality and an incandescent smile.
Dressed in flowing jewel-toned outfits accented with chic jewelry, Borden’s impressive ability to focus and lose herself in the moment makes you want to pick up a drum, or at the very least break out into a wild dance.
Borden experiences an “ecstasy” when she performs and feels that “this is the experience I was brought here to have and share with others.” At these times, she says, “I break out of myself, having no thoughts about anyone, or anything, and at the same time I feel totally connected to the music, other musicians and the audience.” Drums are communication, and for her a transmission of joy and love.
Borden learns from the many drums that she has had over the years. Every living being and non-living thing has a pulse, she believes, and you tune into that when you drum. Drumming has also made her aware of the language of violence. “You don’t slap or hit the drum, you invite the sound out.”
Barbara has taken communication and connectedness to rare heights. Although she has been called a one-woman percussion orchestra, “it has been a revelation that the most important thing to me is not fame, fortune or being the best drummer.” This profound feeling has led her to form powerful connections with cultures around the world through drumming. She has formed profound relationships with people in Siberia and Africa and the Suquamish Tribe of Washington state as well as locally teaching privately and with groups of the elderly at The Redwoods.
Part shaman, part pied piper, Borden brings a type of healing and aliveness to us all with her joyful and passionate drumming, her generous gifting of personal and well-loved drums to other cultures and her genuine acceptance of others.
“Barbara’s message of hope, love, positivity, joy, gratitude and keeping the beat of all these positive values, is inspiring and uplifting,” Brown writes.
Keeper of the Beat; Rafael Film Center, Feb. 25, 7pm and March 3, 7pm; Borden will perform live, and Brown will present the film; rafaelfilm.cafilm.org; For more information, visit kobmovie.com.
Thanks to the impact that coffee and wine have on my taste buds, breakfast turns me into a speed freak. Steak, meanwhile, converts me into a temporary alcoholic—at least until it’s gone.
Put me in front of a greasy or sweet breakfast, and I’m going to drink coffee like it’s oxygen. This is how my body extracts maximum pleasure from the muffin or omelet I’m chewing—by bathing my mouthful in coffee. The coffee’s acidic bitterness makes the flavors of the food stand out, and completes the meal. I’ve researched this relationship at many a greasy spoon diner, where servers endlessly circle to keep your cup full. What the coffee lacks in quality, it makes up for in quantity. That’s important when you’re eating with a beverage condiment, because the last thing you want is for that well to dry up.
Later in the day, there are many foods that essentially command me to drink wine. If I’m chewing a succulent piece of meat, for example, I need to be drinking wine at exactly the same time. Otherwise I get distressed, like an addict in withdrawal.
While there are many foods that go well with wine, only one, meat, will make me drink wine like a dehydration victim would drink Gatorade. When meat and wine are available, it is a scientific fact that I will be stuffed and wasted. And that is pretty much the only time you will see me wasted.
Other than producing buzzes, coffee and wine otherwise seem completely different. But if you look beneath the surface you can see that they are competing for the same niche in the ecosystem of your dining table: The acidic beverage niche.
Acidity serves to enhance the pleasure derived from fatty foods. The fat coats your taste buds and the acid washes that fat away, exposing and stimulating the taste buds and creating fireworks of juxtaposition. If necessary, you may have to adjust fat levels to achieve this balance. I generally do so with mayonnaise.
This principle of creative tension is at the heart of established pairings like wine with cheese, coffee with cream, and 10,000 other flavor combinations.
One thing you rarely see is coffee and wine together. One of them always needs to be there, but having both would be like having two alpha males in the same room. Potentially rough, and at the very least, awkward and uncomfortable. But it turns out that another one of my favorite foods, chili pepper—aka chile—can smooth over this tension.
Like wine and coffee, chile goes exceptionally well with fat, from the jalapeño pepper and its elder the chile relleno, to the requisite squirt of hot sauce upon your big greasy breakfast.
Like coffee and wine, chile produces its own kind of buzz—an adrenaline rush, to be exact. And like the others, chile has many proven and suspected medical benefits, including reducing body inflammation and improving lipid levels in the blood. But unlike coffee, wine or fat, there are few apparent reasons not to indulge one’s chile-tooth to its fullest.
For years, I took it as a given—coffee and wine simply don’t mix. It’s an either/or situation. But this assumption was categorically discredited when I bit into a piece of pork belly that had been braised with red wine, coffee and red chile.
Amazingly, the coffee and wine were able to join forces and forge a common flavor all their own. This union was mediated by chile, the sharp bitterness and sweetness of which formed a narrow bridge between the normally disparate flavors of wine and coffee. That all this flavor alchemy came together in the context of a succulent piece of pork made the experience all the more mouth melting.
This revelation went down at the magical, and sadly defunct Casa Vieja in Corrales, New Mexico, where I consumed this dish next to a crackling fire of fragrant desert wood. Since then I’ve endeavored to recreate this recipe, and somewhere along the line I think I actually surpassed the original, stealing tricks from similar recipes I found online.
My current version combines pork and venison, but any meat will work, even chicken. Bones, whether in oxtail, osso bucco or ribs, will improve the result. The tougher the meat, the better. But if using very lean meat, there needs to be some fat, like bacon or olive oil.
The wine and coffee-based broth tastes kind of disharmonious when you first combine the ingredients. But it eventually cooks into something special, a flavor that is deep and darkly delicious and thoroughly unique.
Fatty meat cooked in coffee and wine
2 lbs meat
1 cup wine, of a quality you would drink
1 cup of strong coffee (no greasy spoon brew here)
3 bay leaves
1 large onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, chopped
2 tablespoons mild red chile powder
2 Santa Fe style dried mild red chiles, seeded and crumbled
2 mild pasilla chiles (or more red chiles), seeded and crumbled
Salt, pepper, and garlic powder
Olive oil
Brown the meat in whole chunks under the broiler. In a pan, sauté the onions, garlic and bay leaves in oil. When onions are translucent, add the chiles. Cook a minute, stirring, then add the coffee and wine. Cook until the volume reduces by half. Season with salt, pepper and garlic powder. Add the meat. Cover meat with stock or water, and slow cook or braise for four to eight hours, until meat is completely tender. Add water, wine or stock as necessary to replace any evaporated liquid. Season again.
Serve in a bowl with minced onions and a hunk of bread, which will absorb the mysterious broth and deliver it to your mouth, where no further adjustments will be necessary. No hot sauce. Not even mayo (well…). Not even wine or coffee (but if you want to, please do).
This dish won’t give a caffeine high or a wine buzz, but it provides a kick all of its own. It was, after all, the pursuit of a flavor fix along these lines that got me into coffee and wine to begin with.
Mariko Yamada was termed-out of her Napa Assembly seat in 2014 and returns to politics this year running for State Senate in the Third District, which comprises all of Napa County and parts of Sonoma County.
The longtime social worker will face off against Bill Dodd (who we interviewed for our February 17 issue) in the California state Democratic primary on June 7. Yamada, who speaks proudly of her 42 years of public service, lives in Yolo County and is the child of Japanese-American parents who were interned during WW II. I met with Yamada last week in Santa Rosa and asked her many of the same questions I put to Dodd, the first of which was whether or not Napa and the North Bay in general had reached a point of “peak wine,” where there’s just no more space for another vineyard.
Mariko Yamada: Yolo County, which is where I live and have lived for 22 years, was one of my first experiences immersing myself in rural and agricultural issues. I was pretty much a city kid all my life, and I consider the last 22 years of my 42 years in public service really important, a change of direction, because that’s part of the issue: What’s the understanding of the rural and urban issues as they relate to wine and the wine industry, which of course is a key part of our agricultural district and heritage?
There are significant debates going on right now about land use as it relates to water and the sustainability issues—not just related to wine issues, but all agriculture. The questions are being asked: Are we the victims of our own success?
Tom Gogola: What’s your view of the Fight for $15 minimum-wage push?
Yamada: There are two tenets that I think of. Nothing is getting any cheaper, and none of us is getting any younger … I support an increase in the minimum wage. It has to be in a partnership at the federal level, which doesn’t look too hopeful anytime soon, but there should be a federal commitment to it. But we can’t wait for other levels of government to lead the way. I do support an increase to $15 over a period of time, but I also support a need for small business—there’s got to be something in it for them, and I’d point to the costs of healthcare and the costs of workers’ compensation which are crushing middle class families …
Gogola: Who would you describe as the main base of support for your Senate run?
Yamada: I want to make sure that people don’t try to typecast anybody in the race, because while I have a track record of 42 years of public service, I think our support comes from a pretty diverse group of people. Certainly, I’m a lifelong Democrat, unlike my principal opponent who recently became a Democrat, just around the time, I think, that he was deciding to possibly run for the Assembly …
My support has traditionally come from what I would call “everyday people.” You need only look at our finance reports to tell. I think Mr. Dodd has, maybe, a little over 400 donors or donations, but he’s managed to raise about a million dollars. And we have more than twice that number of donations, but we’ve raised a quarter of a million dollars. We have over 800 donations …
I have both Democratic and Republican support, I have Green support and I have support from independents. I think we appeal most to what I would call a pragmatic approach to solving some of our state’s most difficult problems.
Gogola: Given the limits of the Affordable Care Act related to providing healthcare to the undocumented, and the heated rhetoric around immigration, what more can the state do to help the undocumented?
Yamada: If you look at this in a historical context, our country was really built on taking advantage of labor … This is not a new phenomenon in our country. We’ve had varying levels of success partly due to the rise of the labor movement and other activists that pointed out the problems in how our capitalist system, frankly, operates … We’ve taken incremental steps to bring people out of the shadows, given that we don’t have a partnership with the federal government, which is exactly where comprehensive reform resides.
We are going to have to continue to make these incremental steps towards ensuring that people who have come here, live here, work here, really pay taxes in their own way but don’t get certain benefits out of it …
Gogola: You’ve said you didn’t run for office to be a bill-writing machine. So let’s say you’re elected to the Senate as a non–bill-writing machine. What do you see as the biggest traps that are out there for the state in general?
Yamada: I have three primary areas; I call them three legs on my policy stool. I will continue to make aging and longer-term care a top policy priority … Secondly, not only because of the district itself but the future of the state, my focus on natural resources and land use and water resources will also be a very clear sort of policy area, with particularly attention to the Delta.
Gogola: What’s your take on Gov. Brown’s twin Delta Tunnel proposal?
Yamada: I oppose them. I have opposed them since the beginning and will continue to oppose them.
Gogola: Since there are two of them, you and Dodd can each oppose one!
Yamada: [Laughs] Right. I think the fact that the Senate District 3 is four or five of the Delta counties, we clearly have to be defenders of the Delta.
And the third leg on my policy stool and born out of my personal view of the world, growing up in a household where my parents had been interned and in a fairly hardscrabble part of town in Denver called the Five Points—about a 95 percent African-American community in the 1950s and ’60s. That was the lens through which my view of the world developed [and] my belief in the fundamental values of our society that we must continue to work for social, economic, educational and environmental justice.
Gogola: How will your experiences in elected office translate to the Senate?
Yamada: Having served in Yolo County—that was my first elected position as a supervisor—there were certain models that were developed. My principal area was in aging and long-term care, so there were a lot of what I would consider to be models of collaboration or integrated services that we attempted to implement in Yolo County that could potentially go statewide. This is a way to reduce inefficiencies in our aging and long-term care system that pits the social model versus the medical model, which leads to a lot of confusion for everyday people—somebody who wants some help with their immediate crisis but doesn’t know where to go to get their needs met.
Gogola: So, Hillary or Bernie?
Yamada: My heart’s with Bernie, my head is with Hillary. And I have not, I have honestly not decided … My first election as a voter was George McGovern … and we saw what happened there. And honestly, that’s really where I am right now.
I know that Mr. Dodd has already participated in headlining fundraisers for Hillary, but I have honestly not made up my mind. Having said that, your primary vote should go to the person who you most believe reflects your values, and that’s where my heart is. But I’m just going to watch it a little bit more and see.
Gogola: It’s interesting that the vernacular of “socialism” around Sanders is lost on a lot of younger voters, who don’t really care about the label as much as older voters do.
Yamada: He certainly is contributing to one of the liveliest debates that I have remembered, and very substantive. He is saying exactly what this country needs to hear, and I think he’s worrying a lot of people, he is worrying Wall Street, certainly the Clinton campaign has to pay attention. I understand that [Hillary] is well-prepared. She has an experience level that cannot be matched, and, honestly, Bernie comes from a state that has 600,000 or 700,000 people. My Senate district has more people than Vermont has as a state. That’s a consideration …
For more than 14,000 years, humans have had a close relationship with wild salmon.
Along the Pacific Coast, natives harvested thousands of adult salmon each fall from their spawning grounds in local rivers and streams, a catch that fed their families throughout the year.
While many cultures in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska are still deeply wedded to the salmon resource, California’s grasp has grown increasingly slippery, with only a small percentage of its historical natural breeding population remaining.
Salmon’s legacy for Californians goes far beyond its estimated $1.4 billion fishery or its classification as one of the most nutritious foods in the world: The fish also provide a vital transfer of nutrients and energy from the ocean back to the freshwater ecosystems where they were born.
“People have done studies to show that you can identify ocean-derived nutrients from salmon in many dozens of different species, like kingfishers or water ouzels, fish-eating ducks, foxes, raccoons, coyotes—all the way up to the big predators that used to live here but are gone, like grizzly bears,” says Nate Mantua, a research scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Southwest Fisheries Science Center in Santa Cruz.
Accumulating 95 percent of their biomass at sea, adult Pacific salmon die after they spawn, and their nutrient-rich carcasses, gametes (mature eggs and sperm) and metabolical waste return to the land. “It’s fascinating that, over the eons, a lot of fertilizer was provided by these dead salmon, so a lot of the wine grapes and a lot of the agriculture inland by the rivers was fertilized by salmon for a long time,” says Randy Repass of the Golden Gate Salmon Association (GGSA), a coalition of salmon advocates based in Petaluma.
Salmon’s yearly return props up an entire food web, replenishing bacteria and algae, bugs and small fish, and fueling plant growth with deposits of nitrogen and phosphorus.
“They fertilized forests as well, there are lots of studies that find salmon’s ocean-derived nutrients in trees that grow along productive salmon watersheds,” says Mantua. “And where we’ve depleted the natural runs of salmon, we’ve really degraded that connection.”
Not part of the aforementioned $1.4 billion fishery, but a big concern in Marin County, are the struggling coho salmon, a species of Pacific salmon that are illegal to eat.
The number of endangered coho salmon in Marin might be up this year—269 ‘nests’—but that number doesn’t mean anything without context and an appreciation of the historical baseline, says Todd Steiner, founder and executive director of the Turtle Island Restoration Network in Olema. The organization’s Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN) is trying to save the coho from outright extinction in California.
A few years ago, the returning coho numbered 250, Steiner says, but a fully recovered fishery would see some 2,600 adult fish a year returning to Marin creeks to spawn, for a decade. But even that won’t get you to the true historical baseline of the fish, given that about half of the salmon’s habitat in Marin County has been destroyed, Steiner says—and continues to be destroyed, especially in the San Geronimo Valley.
Whereas the fight over saving the salmon in other parts of the drought-stricken state often comes down to agriculture issues versus piscine ones—save the steelheads or water the almonds?—in Marin County, the issue is whether the coho can prevail over new-home development in San Geronimo Valley and West Marin.
Steiner says that his organization, along with local water boards and the National Park Service, has been able to “restore the mistakes we’ve made for 100 years,” by, among other measures, restoring creekside habitats in the Lagunitas Creek watershed. At the same time, Marin County has failed to pass a streamside conservation ordinance that would limit future creekside development. That ordinance has been under consideration for 10 years, Steiner says. “So while we are trying to fix the mistakes of the past, we’re basically making the same mistakes as in the past.”
The Lagunitas watershed, Steiner says, fields the largest coho population in the state, but the coho is an endangered species on the brink of extinction in the state. Steiner explains that the San Geronimo Creek is considered a “sub-watershed” to the Lagunitas watershed, as its creek is a tributary of the Lagunitas watershed. The coho, Steiner says, prefer to lay their eggs in the San Geronimo sub-watershed. And that’s a problem, he says, since that’s “where all the development is happening.”
Last year, SPAWN prevailed in litigation against Marin County and forced it to begin assessing development applications with a cumulative impact analysis. “If you always look at it one house at a time, you never see any impact,” Steiner says. “Now the county is doing the cumulative impact analysis, but simultaneously approving development at the same time. As the fish make their way up the Lagunitas Creek, they’re in protected waters in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, and then into Samuel P. Taylor State Park. But that’s where it gets dodgy. The fish continue to head upstream “and into the smaller tributaries—and that’s where the habitat has been destroyed.”
The Chinook (aka king), the largest salmon species (adults often exceed 40 pounds and are capable of growing to 120 pounds), is the pride and joy of California’s salmon fishery. Not so long ago, the Central Valley watershed was one of the biggest producers of naturally breeding Chinook salmon in the world, second only to the Columbia River, with the Klamath River another big California contributor. Driven by the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems, the Central Valley nursed a ballpark average of a few million salmon per year, emerging each spring out of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, says Mantua.
“Today, natural production—maybe in a good year—is in the hundred thousand or hundreds of thousands,” Mantua says. “So, yeah, it’s a few percent of the historical population.”
In addition to cold ocean water and an ample food supply at sea, salmon require cold river water that drains all the way to the sea, and, during their early life, a delta habitat. Salmon eggs do not survive in water warmer than 56 degrees, which is why adult fish ready to spawn instinctively head toward the cold, upper headwaters and tributaries coming out of the snow-packed mountains.
Development in the 1940s through ’60s, and especially the constructions of dams like the Shasta Dam, built in 1943 on the Sacramento River, played a key role in the near annihilation of the long-standing fish stock. “When they built the big dams in California, they basically blocked off access to 80 or 90 percent of the habitat salmon historically used to reproduce in California,” says John McManus, executive director of the GGSA.
California’s four salmon runs—fall, late fall, winter and spring—are named for the time of year the fish return from the open ocean as adults, after about two to five years spent feasting on smaller fish and krill at sea, and back under the Golden Gate Bridge to the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. As of 1989, the winter run had joined the ranks of 130 other endangered and threatened marine species when it was listed as an endangered species under the Federal Endangered Species Act. Ten years later, the spring run was listed as threatened.
“When we have a really good fishing year out in the ocean, it’s because of two things,” McManus says. “We have a good contribution from natural spawning salmon coming out of the Central Valley, and we have a good contribution from the hatcheries.”
In addition to cold ocean water and an ample food supply at sea, salmon require cold river water that drains all the way to the sea, and, during their early life, a delta habitat.
Following a period of abundance in the late ’80s, and then again in the late ’90s and early 2000s, California’s salmon season was closed in 2008 and 2009, resulting from a population crash that NOAA scientists found was due to a lack of upwelling and the subsequent low production of krill, one of salmon’s dietary staples.
“The population has undergone a modest rebound since then, but it still has not reached the abundance that we observed in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” says Michael O’Farrell, a research fish biologist at the NOAA.
While there has been an increase in small sardines, a potential good sign for salmon, Greg Ambiel, who has been fishing salmon locally for 30 years, is not hedging any bets for this coming season.
“The fish are being killed in the Central Valley before they get a chance to get to the ocean,” Ambiel says. “If you follow the money, that’s who gets the water. It’s simple: Just go look at the almond trees in the Central Valley.”
Indeed, over the last few years, a fairly drastic shift has occurred, with high-profit almond crops replacing raisin grapes and other less profitable crops in the Central Valley. The problem for salmon is that it takes a gallon of water to produce one almond—which is three times more water than it takes to produce a grape—according to a study published in 2011 at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. Water demands for agriculture are a known contributor to an estimated 95 percent loss of salmon’s critical rearing ground in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
Last month, O’Farrell began the process of calculating 2016 abundance forecasts for both the Sacramento and Klamath rivers and tributaries, based on data that includes the return of fish the previous fall. Each March, he reports the number to the Pacific Fishery Management Council, who then sets the season in April.
“Where we’re at right now, we’ve come out of the very low abundance periods of 2008 and 2009, but we don’t know exactly what the returns are for this past year,” O’Farrell says. “There are some issues that we are monitoring with regard to the effects of drought and ocean conditions. It’s hard to say which way the population’s going to go at this point, but we’ll have more information on that in a couple of months.”
The Central Valley Project Improvement Act, passed in 1992, ambitiously hoped to double the number of salmon and steelhead trout in the Sacramento River basin over the past 22 years, but it has fallen short. While their goal was to see 86,000 spring-run Chinook salmon spawning in the Central Valley by 2012, the number was only 30,522. Federal officials cited obstacles such as drought, competing demands for water and lack of funding.
But Steve Lindley, leader of the Fisheries Ecology Division at the NOAA, points to wetland restoration success stories in the Central Valley, in places like Clear Creek and Butte Creek.
“These shallow areas that are nurseries for salmon—those populations have done very well, even during the poor ocean and drought periods,” he says, “so it’s not a lost cause. But we do really need to address some of these habitat issues, and find a way to operate salmon hatcheries in a way that supports our fisheries without imperiling their long-term liability. We’re really keen on working with GGSA and the fishing community and the broader fish and water communities to try to find those kind of solutions.”
Hero: You know that feeling when you see someone who looks familiar? If your memory is like mine, you give the person another glance, rack your brain to no avail and move on. Good thing Sausalito police officer Justin Ritz has better retention skills. Last week, Ritz saw and recognized a guy—from a photo on an FBI wanted poster. The observant cop was on an unrelated call in the area of Liberty Ship Way and Marinship Way when he detained and arrested Grant Wojahn, 35, for alleged child porn crimes committed in Illinois. The man on the lam had been living on a friend’s boat in Richardson Bay to avoid capture. Officer Ritz, thank you for foiling the fugitive and keeping our community safe.
Zero: Human beings are not dartboards. Apparently, a miscreant with missiles missed this missive, because two pedestrians were struck by darts while they strolled across the Golden Gate Bridge last Friday afternoon. The 5-inch metal blowgun darts penetrated their skin. Ouch! In separate incidents, a man was hit in the thigh and a woman in the kneecap. At least the lunkhead aimed low. Fortunately, both victims were treated and released at the scene. Investigators are now reviewing footage from the bridge cameras and the projectiles were sent to the lab. Ergo, the dart-blowing dolt is doomed. Anyone with information should contact the CHP at 415/924-1000.
Got a Hero or a Zero? Please send submissions to ni***************@ya***.com.
Q: I’m a very successful guy in my 30s. I had a lot of casual sex in my 20s, but I got sick of the disconnection and emotional fallout. I’m looking for a relationship, and I’ve started waiting to sleep with women (for at least a month). I tell them this, but the waiting thing seems to make them want me more and push to have sex. What I don’t get is why some get so angry at me.—Slow Train
A: Women are used to men wanting sex right away—or sooner, if possible. Your being the one with your legs crossed? Well, it’s like offering a dog a strip of bacon and having him look up and say, “Aww … thanks, doll, but I’m good.”
Now if these women getting angry with you were just lusty, there’s an app for that—one that allows a moderately attractive woman to swipe a sex partner over faster than Domino’s can get there with a pizza. The problem here is female sexual psychology. We all want to be wanted, but research by clinical psychologist Marta Meana finds that women, especially, seem to have an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired. This makes evolutionary sense, in light of women’s need for reliable signs that a guy would stick around after sex to “provide.” A man having an uncontrollable longing for a particular woman is pretty great insurance—right up there with leg-shackling him to the cave wall.
Not surprisingly, according to research by evolutionary psychologist Patricia Hawley, if there’s catnip for women, it’s those “bodice ripper” novels. They feature intense male desire for a woman, but not of just any male—a “powerful, resource-holding” one, like the playboy prince or titan of industry. This alpha god cannot be tamed, until … whoops … up pops our heroine, the apparently ordinary maiden. The hunky royal or CEO is so taken with her unique (and otherwise overlooked) beauty and spirit that he can’t help but grab her and “ravish” her. Of course, in real life, we call this felony rape. In romance novels, when the guy is uber-rich and cruelly handsome, it’s the start of a beautiful relationship.
So, women’s inability to defeat the time lock on your zipper is telling them something—no, not, “Wow … he thinks I’m really worth getting to know,” but, “Wow … he thinks I’m uggo” and, “That two-week sabbatical from Booty Barre has really caught up with me.” It may help a little to reassure them that you find them wildly attractive—like by “confessing” that you have to take three cold showers and stare at pictures of steamed vegetables before every date. For you, this is the only possible way to keep from giving them one of those man-scam long hugs that turns into sex … uh, that is, three weeks and four days later.
Q: I was dating this girl for about three weeks, but I just wasn’t really feeling it, so I “ghosted”—stopped asking her out and just didn’t respond to her texts. Some of my friends said I was mean to “ghost,” but honestly, I think it’s a lot kinder than telling somebody you’re not into them. Why have an uncomfortable conversation when you can just slip out and everybody is spared?—Faded Away
A: Why take 45 seconds to text a girl that it’s over when you can make her obsess about you for two months straight, stalk you on Instagram and bore her friends catatonic with, “Is his phone broken? Is my phone broken? Did he see that drunken Facebook post? Should I have waxed my moustache?”
Wordlessly disappearing on somebody you’ve spent more than a couple of hours with at a coffee bar is a kick in their dignity—telling them they aren’t even important enough for you to tell them they aren’t important. It also makes a person go unnecessarily berserko, due to what’s called the “Zeigarnik effect.” Russian psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik observed that unfinished business causes administrative problems for our mind—leaving it in a “state of tension” and causing it to annoy us (over and over) to get “closure” on whatever’s been interrupted and left incomplete.
This isn’t to say that you owe a woman a detailed rundown on your feelings; you just need to tell her that you’re done. Ideally, open with something complimentary, and then bring down the ax: “Not working for me.” “Not feeling it.” That sort of thing. She’ll cry, she’ll eat some cake and she’ll move on. Ultimately, if you want to be kind, a breakup should feel more like ripping off a Band-Aid than hysterically searching for your car for four hours in a multi-level parking structure.
This week in the Pacific Sun, you’ll find our cover story, ‘Key to the coast,’ a beach bum’s manifesto on access to California’s shores. On top of that, we have a Q & A with Bill Dodd, pro-biz Napa Democrat who is running for State Senate, a review of San Rafael’s new State Room, a review of the play ‘Kismet’ and a piece on Otis, a traveling house band specializing in the Memphis soul sound. All that and more on stands and online today!
Napa State Assemblyman Bill Dodd served as a Napa County Supervisor for 14 years before winning his Assembly seat in 2014. He was named to the Assembly agriculture committee, and in December was picked to be its chairman.
Dodd, a former Republican, is running for State Senate against former Assemblywoman Mariko Yamada. I met with Dodd at the Oxbow Market in Napa on a recent rainy afternoon. The first question to Dodd was about his rise in state politics—and that he’s the first-ever Committee on Agriculture chairman who doesn’t hail from the Central Valley. Why him, and why now?
Bill Dodd: It’s probably better stated that I’m probably the first guy from Northern California, maybe north of the Delta, to be the chairman of the ag committee. I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about it, but I think that they’ve seen in my year in the Assembly that I’m pretty balanced. I have a pretty good ability to balance business interests and environmental interests, and my experience in Napa County, just along those veins, is that I reject the notion that agriculture and the environment are mutually exclusive entities. I really believe that we’re in big trouble if the environmental community and the agricultural community can’t come together. Because of environmental interests, we have sustainable farming, which has completely taken off. . . . What we should do is celebrate those environmental farmers for the great job that they’ve done and use them as examples of best practices to farmers that have not yet seen the light in some of these areas.
Tom Gogola: What is your view on this notion of “peak wine,” that we’ve got too many vineyards in Napa County and the North Bay?
Dodd: When I was working as a county supervisor, we had our general plan, and we worked really hard to try and identify what was left and have some goals—not only on acreage of grapes that could be planted, but also, how many more wineries do we really need, or want. We’ve had big community discussions, even when I was first in office in the early 2000s, on grape-growing.
Frankly, Napa County’s got the most stringent agricultural rules of any agricultural region in the world, and my guess is that Sonoma County is a close second. I think that Napa has about 45,000 acres of grapes, and the conventional wisdom says that the industry would be lucky to increase that by 10 percent or another 5,000 acres or so. Now, there are some people who wouldn’t want that at all. But my standpoint is that I think that the erosion control plans that are required, the careful scrutiny of large projects having to have full environmental impact reports, are important to the discussion. Nowhere else are they making them do full environmental impact reports.
Gogola: How do you translate the dynamics on the ground in Napa now that you have statewide authority as chairman of the Committee on Agriculture?
Dodd: I think there’s a realization, with climate change being such an important policy discussion in the state of California, that many farmers see the writing on the wall and are already working with technology to become more sustainable. Case in point, irrigation. The day and age where we are going to flood-irrigate our crops I think should have come and gone by now. But it is a huge investment to change this; it doesn’t happen overnight, but I believe that it’s incumbent upon the industry and the market to move them towards solutions to these problems. . . .
Gogola: Your predecessor on the ag committee [former assemblyman Henry Perea] was part of the moderate caucus of the state Democratic Party, and when he left the Assembly, he almost immediately took a job with the pharmaceutical lobby. You’re moving very quickly through governance here—what are your other ambitions beyond elective office?
Dodd: It is very, very simple: I intend to serve my eight years, two terms in the state Senate and advance policies that will—we haven’t even talked about education—that will make California a better place for future generations. I have five kids and five grandkids, and I just think that the next generation or two of Californians, if we don’t advance these important policies, in the state, we will not have anywhere near the California that my parents and grandparents left me.
Gogola: What’s your view on the “Fight for $15” minimum wage and how it has played out in the state, locally and nationally?
Dodd: I see advancement in the state toward a higher minimum wage. We have to be careful. We represent the entire state of California. And it’s kind of like there’s a tale of two cities, if you will. You have the interior part of the state of California, where the economy has not come back anywhere near as strongly as it has from Sonoma County to San Diego County on the coast. But if you look at the interior counties—from San Bernardino to Modoc County—unemployment is high, businesses are not back and people are suffering. So I think what we’ll see is cities take this on, on a regional basis for the foreseeable future.
Gogola: It sounds like what you are saying is it would be great to have a $15 minimum wage, but what’s the point of having it if there isn’t a job to pay the wage?
Dodd: I guess I’d say that. But the fact of the matter is that the increased cost of living, and the cost of housing and all of that throughout my district and future Senate district, demands that people get more than the minimum wage. And that’s not lost on me. I will tell you that as a former businessperson for 25 years, that when the unemployment rate goes down, as it has in the stronger counties, I would fully expect that wages will go up because of the demand for high-quality workers and the lack of supply. . . .
One thing I want to bring up—you brought up Henry Perea, he was a moderate. The two people that picked me in concert were the Speaker right now, Toni Atkins, and the new one coming in gave his approval, too, Anthony Rendon. They’re both progressive, strong-Democratic-value leaders that know me and work well with me, and know that I have the balance to balance these real important issues. And I’m really appreciative of their confidence.
Gogola: Do you think there’s anything to the idea that undocumented workers are taking jobs from American workers?
Dodd: I reject that notion. I don’t think there’s a significant workforce willing to do the type of jobs that our immigrant population—legal or illegal—provides for our economies. . . . I think that a lot of the workforce that we have today, their kids are getting a great opportunity. They are advancing the economy, our local economies which are renowned worldwide, their kids are going to our schools and in many cases excelling, and many times are the first generation in their families to go to college, and they’re not looking to be farm workers in the future. So this issue is not going to go away. We’ve got to have programs that are going to satisfy our need for labor in these agricultural areas.
Gogola: Your opponent in this race is a supporter of capital punishment. You?
Dodd: She is? I am torn between the families of victims and how they would feel about this, particularly violent murders, rape, etc., but I also understand the almost barbaric nature of the death penalty. Certainly that is going to be an issue that I am going to have to work hard on the policy moving forward. I think the other thing is the cost of our prison systems—we used to be the fifth, top five, in the nation in spending per pupil, and at the bottom five in per-prisoner spending. Today, we’re at the top five in prisoner spending and the bottom five in education spending. So that balance has got to be there as well.
Gogola: Last question. Hillary or Bernie?
Dodd: You’ve just spent like 45 minutes turning your readers on about me, I hope, and now I’m going to piss ’em off in one breath. [Laughs] No, I am all in with Hillary. Matter of fact, I talked with her while she was in Napa Valley, I had dinner with her in a very small group. And she’s talking about the same things that I am talking about, and our congressman is talking about: schools, education of our kids, jobs and the economy, the environment . . . And the one thing that I was really impressed with was her wanting to change the status quo on mental health in the United States. . . .
Gogola: I think about that famous line from Mario Cuomo, that you campaign in poetry but govern in prose. Are Democrats campaigning in the poetry of Sanders but will eventually accept the prose of Hillary Clinton?
Dodd: I think so. That’s not to say, if you go back and listen to Bernie’s stuff, go back to 2000, the 1990s, I don’t know how early he was making those predictions about income inequality, what was going to happen in Iraq. He may not be the next president of the United States, but you’ve got to give him some props for being a very smart public servant.
Gogola: I will make sure that comment makes it into the story.
It may not be doing Robert Eggers’ The Witch a favor to describe it as a terrifying movie. It’s an elegantly moody horror film, more substantial than scary. Eggers’ drama shows a 1630s family in colonial Massachusetts turning against itself. The possibility of reasonable explanations fade, as the supernatural becomes natural.
It begins with a shunning; a family of six exiled from the Plimoth [apparently how it was spelled back then] Plantation for religious non-conformity. A horse-drawn wagon loads them out of the town and into new pastures. The refuge lasts a short blissful while. One afternoon, the 13-ish Thomasin (the uncanny Anya Taylor-Joy) plays peekaboo with her infant sister. When her eyes are covered for a second, the baby vanishes. Eggers cuts to a crone’s sagging arm, satanically blessing the nude baby with a knife.
The pious but rational father William (Ralph Ineson) believes that a wolf snatched his child. He deals with the sorrow of his grieving spouse (Kate Dickie). Omens of trouble multiply, as do subtle incestuous tensions. When William and his eldest son Caleb (Harvey Scrimshaw) go hunting, they see an unafraid wild rabbit standing its ground, like a rutting March Hare in October. Lost in the woods, Caleb encounters a beautiful, red-caped woman, and afterwards he returns to the farm babbling and without his clothes, just as his father describes him: “Pale as death, naked as sin, and witched.”
One warning: It’s said that an English speaker of today, traveling back in time, could only understand conversations if they went back no earlier than the Shakespearean era. Shakespeare hadn’t been long dead in 1630—the script is full of authentic dialogue that one strains to understand. (If English subtitling on an English language film is good enough for Ken Loach, maybe it would have been good enough for The Witch.) Still, Eggers has a terrific eye for the past. He takes an elegantly simple approach to his compositions and uses candlelight illumination that reminds you of the French painter Georges de La Tour. It’s as tangible a vision of the 1600s as you see in one of the last films made in this era, Terrence Malick’s The New World.
Specializing in the Memphis soul sound made famous by Stax Records in the 1960s, Otis is a unique soul revue, a traveling house band that backs a rotating roster of legendary soul singers and rising stars for exuberant concert experiences.
Formed in San Francisco by longtime friends and musicians Mike Yoffie and Dave Wiens, Otis plays the Sweetwater Music Hall on Friday, February 26, with the help of soul singers Freddie Hughes and Erin Honeywell.
Yoffie, a San Rafael native who plays the B3 Hammond Organ, and Wiens, a Fresno native who slaps the bass, have been friends for more than a decade. They first played together in a ska band called Radio Noise.
“I’ve always loved the B3 sound, and Mike’s playing,” Wiens says. “We both fell in love with the Stax Records sound, especially Booker T and Otis Redding.” Three years ago, the two incorporated drummer Hud Bixler and guitarist Craig Daniel to help them recapture the Stax spirit and introduce that classic soul sound to a new generation under the Otis moniker.
Formed in the late ’50s, Stax Records was the embodiment of Memphis soul. Throughout the ’60s, the artists on Stax performed sold-out revue tours, which are now the stuff of legends.
Last year, the core members of Otis traveled back to Memphis, toured the Stax Music Academy and played with Memphis legends like Wayne Jackson. “That was like our pilgrimage to Mecca,” Yoffie says.
“It was amazing; we really made a deeper connection to the music,” adds Wiens.
Newly enthused by the recent trip, Otis’s ever-evolving concert experiences transcend the cover band concept by taking the Stax revue idea and modernizing it. “We have our own sound and our own feel,” Yoffie says. Playing obscure B-sides as well as their own original material, Otis mixes their influences and filters them through their own musical styles.
For the upcoming performance in Mill Valley, Otis is enlisting the power-packed talent of Freddie Hughes. Hughes scored several soul hits in the ’60s and ’70s, and performed with other luminaries like James Brown and Aretha Franklin. Now living in Oakland, his audiences have dwindled, though Otis is looking to change that.
“That’s a big part of what this project is about,” Yoffie says. “We want to create a platform for different singers, both established and up-and-coming.”
With the help of Hughes and rising star Erin Honeywell, as well as a phenomenal horn section, Otis plans to bring a raw, powerful energy to the upcoming concert. “People really respond to the music,” Yoffie says. “And we’re always blown away by the energy of the crowds.”
Otis plays on Friday, Feb. 26, at Sweetwater Music Hall, 19 Corte Madera Ave, Mill Valley; 9pm; $20-$25; 415/388-1100.
By Ellen Shehadeh
All of the drummers that Barbara Borden saw as a child were men—except for one little boy, a Mouseketeer named Cubby. Even so, at age 5 while shopping one day with her mother at Sears Roebuck, Borden spied a drum and insisted on having it.
At age 70, Borden—drummer, drum teacher and performing artist—knows for certain that “drumming...
By Ari LeVaux
Thanks to the impact that coffee and wine have on my taste buds, breakfast turns me into a speed freak. Steak, meanwhile, converts me into a temporary alcoholic—at least until it’s gone.
Put me in front of a greasy or sweet breakfast, and I’m going to drink coffee like it’s oxygen. This is how my body extracts maximum...
By Tom Gogola
Mariko Yamada was termed-out of her Napa Assembly seat in 2014 and returns to politics this year running for State Senate in the Third District, which comprises all of Napa County and parts of Sonoma County.
The longtime social worker will face off against Bill Dodd (who we interviewed for our February 17 issue) in the California state...
By Maria Grusauskas
For more than 14,000 years, humans have had a close relationship with wild salmon.
Along the Pacific Coast, natives harvested thousands of adult salmon each fall from their spawning grounds in local rivers and streams, a catch that fed their families throughout the year.
While many cultures in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska are still deeply wedded to the...
By Nikki Silverstein
Hero: You know that feeling when you see someone who looks familiar? If your memory is like mine, you give the person another glance, rack your brain to no avail and move on. Good thing Sausalito police officer Justin Ritz has better retention skills. Last week, Ritz saw and recognized a guy—from a photo on an FBI...
By Amy Alkon
Q: I’m a very successful guy in my 30s. I had a lot of casual sex in my 20s, but I got sick of the disconnection and emotional fallout. I’m looking for a relationship, and I’ve started waiting to sleep with women (for at least a month). I tell them this, but the waiting thing seems to...
This week in the Pacific Sun, you'll find our cover story, 'Key to the coast,' a beach bum's manifesto on access to California's shores. On top of that, we have a Q & A with Bill Dodd, pro-biz Napa Democrat who is running for State Senate, a review of San Rafael's new State Room, a review of the play...
By Tom Gogola
Napa State Assemblyman Bill Dodd served as a Napa County Supervisor for 14 years before winning his Assembly seat in 2014. He was named to the Assembly agriculture committee, and in December was picked to be its chairman.
Dodd, a former Republican, is running for State Senate against former Assemblywoman Mariko Yamada. I met with Dodd at the...
By Richard von Busack
It may not be doing Robert Eggers’ The Witch a favor to describe it as a terrifying movie. It’s an elegantly moody horror film, more substantial than scary. Eggers’ drama shows a 1630s family in colonial Massachusetts turning against itself. The possibility of reasonable explanations fade, as the supernatural becomes natural.
It begins with a shunning; a...
By Charlie Swanson
Specializing in the Memphis soul sound made famous by Stax Records in the 1960s, Otis is a unique soul revue, a traveling house band that backs a rotating roster of legendary soul singers and rising stars for exuberant concert experiences.
Formed in San Francisco by longtime friends and musicians Mike Yoffie and Dave Wiens, Otis plays the Sweetwater...
